


He wasn't there again today

by novelDaydreamer



Category: Girl Genius (Webcomic)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, ghost story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-10
Updated: 2019-07-10
Packaged: 2020-06-25 22:38:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19755175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/novelDaydreamer/pseuds/novelDaydreamer
Summary: Sparkwork - particularly sparkwork made under the influence of strong emotion - is notorious for having unintended effects.(Barry did say her parents would protect her.)





	He wasn't there again today

When Agatha is five years old, the music stops. 

Something _else_ shows up instead.

-

“Uncle Barry says you’re an imaginary friend,” Agatha says. She kicks a pebble on the side of the road; watches it tumble down the dirt and sink into the ravine with a ‘plop.’

The figure next to her doesn’t make a sound, but she gets a distinct feeling of amused tolerance, underlaid as always by a deep melancholy. A breeze ruffles her hair. 

Agatha wastes a few seconds patting it back into place. “I don’t think you’re imaginary,” she says. “You’re not interesting enough. My imaginary friend would be… a clank. But a _smart_ clank, a little one, that would _listen to me, and help me build -_ ow!”

When her headache fades, there’s an insubstantial hand rubbing circles on her back. Agatha can’t really feel it, but she supposes it’s the thought that counts.

Agatha rubs her eyes. “You’re good at listening, anyway.” 

She just wishes he wasn’t so _sad_.

-

It only takes a couple of encounters with kids looking for something to be cruel about for Agatha to learn that her friend should be a secret. Uncle Barry relaxes a bit when she stops talking about him, and her friend doesn’t seem to mind.

(That’s not _entirely_ true, but it doesn’t make him any sadder than everything else does.)

It takes six months of living together before Agatha brings him up to Adam and Lilith.

“Your friend?”

“Mm-hm.” Agatha watches Lilith out of the corner of her eye, pretending to read her math book. Her legs swing under the kitchen table. Her friend is leaning against the wall by the door, also watching Lillith as she prepares her preserves. His feelings when he sees her and Adam are _interesting_ , fondness and regret and a little bit of something that isn’t quite betrayal.

Though probably more interesting is that he’s having feelings at all about anybody but her and Uncle Barry.

“Nobody else can see him, but he’s real.” Agatha underlines a word in pencil. “He helps me sometimes when people are being mean.”

“I see,” Lilith says carefully. She lifts the pot of jam off the stove and sets it on the counter to cool before turning to Agatha. “Why don’t you tell me about…” there’s a brief pause, “him?”

Agatha looks up and examines her friend. He looks back at her calmly, face as blurred as it always is. The doorframe is visible through his torso, behind a suggestion of a jacket that… might be green? Maybe?

She would squint to see if she can make out any better details, but she can already feel a headache threatening.

“He’s taller than me,” Agatha says instead. “And he’s sad a lot. Kind of like Uncle Barry.”

“I _see._ ” Lilith pulls out a chair next to her and sits down. “Agatha, you know your Uncle will be back as soon as he can.” 

Agatha doesn’t look at her. “I know.”

Lilith puts a hand on her shoulder. It’s still weird to feel a solid hand that’s not her Uncle Barry. Not a bad weird. Just weird. “Do you want to go get his letter so we can read it again?”

“Okay,” Agatha says, even though she’s more than capable of reading on her own.

(She kind of gets the feeling that Lilith doesn’t quite believe her, but that’s okay. Uncle Barry didn’t either. 

She’ll have to try Adam later today.)

-

(Sometimes, Agatha thinks she sees a hint - just a flicker - of a second figure. It never stays for more than a few seconds.

Agatha doesn’t like it. Whenever it shows up, her friend stops being mostly sad, and starts being _angry_.)

-

Agatha is ten years old when she finally accepts that Uncle Barry isn’t going to return for her.

She spends the next three hours crying in her room.

“If I just wasn’t - If I wasn’t so useless...” she sobs, “Why do I have to be so _stupid_? I - ow! Ow, ow, ow…”

A translucent hand pauses in its circling, insubstantial fingers resting on the chain of her locket. After a long moment, it continues, the symbolic action the only comfort her friend can give.

Resting on her bedspread, the other hand curls into a fist.

“I just… maybe he’d come _back…_ ”

(Agatha has never been able to explain or quantify the strange sense she has of what her friend is feeling. In this case, it wouldn’t matter; his guilt, grief, and anger mix quite thoroughly with her own.)

-

“Doctor Beetle is letting me assist with his work!” Agatha spins around and collapses on her bed, laughing. Seated at her desk, her friend radiates a more subdued happiness. 

“He’s brilliant, his clank design is amazingly complex - I’m going to learn so much from him, I know I’ll be able to build things that actually work!” Agatha has been holding this rant in all day. “I don’t know if you saw, when he was doing the maintenance on the soldier he let me examine the joints, and he said he’s going to be working on _Tock_ next month -”

Agatha could have kept talking for the rest of the evening, stopping only to sketch out some of the new ideas that had struck her as Doctor Beetle explained the principles behind Beetleburg’s clank army. Maybe she wouldn’t even have gone to bed, so caught up in work that she wouldn’t notice the time passing until her alarm went off, leaving her stumbling through the lab in a sleep-deprived fugue the next morning.

So in some ways, maybe it’s a good thing that a headache interrupts her. 

“I’m so happy,” she says finally, once the pain ebbs. “I just don’t understand… why would he pick me?”

There’s a cold draft across her elbow. Agatha opens her eyes, already knowing what she’ll see: her friend seated at her side, hand on her arm. Pride, and encouragement, and concern all together, with a wistful sort of sadness underneath it all.

“You’re right,” Agatha says. She gives him a determined smile. “I can do this.” 

-

Agatha is late, hungry, and tired. 

Her friend, being intangible, can’t actually wake her up if she oversleeps. He’s also just as prone to being distracted by interesting projects as she is, peering over her shoulder with evident interest and even pointing out alterations to the mechanism. (Half of her small collection of successes she privately attributes to his help.)

So when her glasses start arcing, when the air splits open in front of her, Agatha doesn’t see the translucent hand trying to point out a safer route. With her glasses knocked onto the concrete, she doesn’t see the figure looming over the vagrant soldiers, or his warring pride and worry when she grabs a bottle to fight back.

Distracted by the theft of her locket, Agatha doesn’t see her friend wink out of existence.

-

(Omar is drunk, and then dying. If he’s raving about a terrifying apparition, well, he’s raving about a dozen other things too.

By the time Moloch picks up the broken pieces of the locket, there’s nothing for him to see.)

-

Agatha’s friend tends to make himself scarce when she’s busy talking to other people, or when she’s in a state of undress. Granted, he would usually be around on such an eventful day… but those same events keep her from really noticing his absence.

At least at first.

“Hello?” It comes out barely more than a whisper. “Are you here?”

Agatha searches the room for any sign, even the faintest heat-shimmer. Breathes slowly, trying to feel a trace of emotion that isn’t her own uncertainty.

Nothing.

“Do you think that really was Othar?” She asks the air. “I don’t know why the Baron would have him locked up. These people… I hope Adam and Lilith are okay. I hope they aren’t too worried.”

It’s not the same without someone to answer her. Agatha trails off.

Lies down and stares at the ceiling.

(It’s a lonely night, for all that she’s exhausted. One thing out of a hundred that are wrong with the situation, maybe, but it’s a big one.

She falls asleep listening to the cat finish her dinner.)

-

“The first time you fed me. Who were you talking to?” Krosp asks suspiciously, days later.

Agatha hesitates. Looks, subtly, around the empty room.

“Nobody,” she says. “I just talk to myself, sometimes.”

-

A day after that, her parents are dead.

-

Krosp helps. He’s not as good a listener as her friend was, but it’s nice to talk to someone who can answer back. Zeetha helps too; the workouts are a good distraction, if a painful one.

Lars is his own kind of distraction, but not unwelcome.

And then there are the Jaegers.

-

“You’ve known a lot of the Heterodynes, right?”

“Ho yez!” Dimo grins, a faint phosphorescent green shining through his teeth. “Dozens. Mebbe a hundred by now, Hy dun count dem.”

Beside Agatha, Maxim frowns in contemplation and starts ticking off fingers, silently mouthing names. All three of them are crowded closer to her than would normally be socially appropriate, but Agatha’s not inclined to complain. Oggie is the only one to actually hug her so far, but if staying close for a while will reassure them that she’s real…

Well. They’re _hers._

Agatha hesitates for a moment; tries to figure out how to word her question. “The way people talk about… us,” she says slowly, “Heterodynes are different from other sparks. But I don’t know _how_ , except that apparently it’s discernable by smell?”

“To Jaegerkin,” Dimo clarifies. “Iz so ve alvays know who iz ov de bloodline.”

“But Hy iz sure hyu schmell goot to other pipple too!” Oggie interjects.

“Und dere iz de Heterodyning!” Maxim leaves off his counting, having run out of fingers. “Iz de hummink hyu does ven hyu vants to focus. All de masters ken do dot.”

“But odder den dat, Heterodynes iz just… more,” Dimo finishes. “Schmoter, better, bigger ideaz. Iz vhy pipple vas so scared ov dem, und vhy dey luffed hyu papa und uncle so much. A Heterodyne vants to move de vorld, dey _do_ it.”

That’s… daunting. But also encouraging, because she can see in their faces that not one of them has any doubt that she will live up to it.

It doesn’t really answer her question though.

“Did the Heterodynes you knew ever see things that other people couldn’t?”

“Um.” Dimo blinks, caught off-guard. “Hy dun tink so?”

“Dere vas Master Robur’s angels,” Oggie offers.

“Dot vasn’t becuz he vas a Heterodyne, dot vas just a spark ting dot he made.”

Almost of their own accord, Agatha’s fingers drift up to her bare neck.

-

(Klaus often feels like someone is watching over his shoulder. It’s part of running an empire.

It’s no mystery why the feeling grows stronger when he’s repairing a locket that might as well scream _Barry made this_.)

-

Lucrezia is familiar.

Agatha doesn’t want her to be. Agatha would prefer to have never encountered her mother at all, and certainly to have no idea what her twisted emotions feel like, or what it’s like to have her mind pressing down, trying to smother Agatha beneath the weight of her mother’s warped ambitions.

But those emotions _are_ familiar.

(Just a flicker)

-

When Agatha wakes up with the locket on, she’s too surprised to really notice the figure reaching out for her.

After that, she’s too enraged.

-

Agatha waits for Zeetha to leave. Waits long enough to check the door, to make sure that they’ve actually given her a minute to clear her head.

Then she turns and looks the figure full in the face.

“You’re Bill Heterodyne,” she says quietly. “My father.”

He bows his head.

-

“I know why Uncle Barry thought the locket was necessary. I know why my _parents_ didn’t tell me.”

He flinches, almost imperceptibly.

“But you didn’t have to listen to Uncle Barry. You were _there_. You saw _everything_ it did to me. _Why didn’t you tell me?_ ”

_Regret. Affection. Determination._

_...Shame._

“...Oh.”

Agatha has to sit down.

Her father is standing with his back to the mirror. Agatha can see her own reflection in the glass, face pale over the brass of the locket.

“I don’t regret knowing you,” she says, eventually. “I don’t know if I can say it was worth it. But I’m glad that you were there for me, even if it wasn’t… the way we would have wanted to be.”

_Guilt_.

“I’m going to Mechanicsburg.”Agatha meets her father’s eyes as best she can. “I know he was your friend, but the Baron isn’t going to stop coming after me, and I can’t let him keep killing the people around me. I have to be strong enough to stand against him, and for that I need to be the Heterodyne. And… I think _they_ need me to be the Heterodyne too.”

Her father moves, finally. Comes over to sit beside her on the bed, and puts his hand carefully over hers, no more pressure than a cool breeze. Agatha studies the translucent fingers, larger than hers, too out-of-focus to see the calluses and scars she knows must have been there.

Over the ever-present grief, all she can feel is _pride_.

-

Walking into Mechanicsburg is a surreal experience. Every person she sees, she can’t help but wonder, _did my father know them_? Every street, _how often did he walk here?_ And, _can this really be mine?_

Her father provides no answers. Every turn is met with the same wistful, bitter melancholy.

And then the pink fake shows up, and Agatha has other things to think about.

-

“Ah. Noticed, have you?”

It takes a moment for Agatha to realize what he’s talking about, shaken by the flood of grief from her father, suddenly kneeling in front of her. Then she sees the stone in front of him, and oh.

_Oh._

Her father can’t tell her what happened that night. She asks the Seneschal, instead. 

When they leave, to meet the person who can guide her inside the castle, her father stays behind. All the way down the stairs, she can still feel him mourning.

-

There’s not a lot that Agatha’s father can actually help her with, when it comes to surviving the castle and escaping the various enemies inside. He _could_ have pointed out the location of every trap along the way, as she and Moloch make their way towards the library. He doesn’t. 

He doesn’t have to.

(Agatha glances at him, just for an instant, as the chapel faces her down. She would have given it her hand even without his steady confidence… but it does help.) 

-

“Was the castle _always_ like this?” Agatha hisses.

The roll of _exasperation_ tells her everything she needs to know.

-

(Agatha’s father likes Zeetha, and is cautiously approving of both Violetta and Moloch. He does _not_ like Tarvek or Gil, especially after Agatha manages to get sick right along with them.

But he loathes the pink fake possibly more than even Agatha does, so _that’s_ alright.)

-

“I’ll have to take the locket off,” Agatha whispers, adjusting the power supply to her harness. “I can’t afford to have any metal on during the _Si Vales Valeo_. It _should_ only be for a minute, I’m pretty sure I can trust Violetta, and the straps are secure…”

“Um - mistress?” Snaug finishes securing her cable and stands. “Are you talking to me?”

Agatha meets her father’s eyes for a long moment, taking in the fear, confidence, and sparky focus in his gaze.

“No,” Agatha says. “Just talking to myself.”

-

(With the taste of the Dyne on her lips, Agatha can see _everything_. The connections of the _Si Vales Valeo,_ trading life and essence and fate between the three of them; the castle, ancient and terrible and _great,_ trapped (for the moment) in a delicate tracery of clockwork and wires; the locket around her neck, operating on a level that its creator never dreamed of.

Suspended in an eternal moment of supreme clarity, it’s simplicity itself to just _increase the power_.)

-

_...If you die-_

_Then… All the rest…_

_The rest is… pointless._

**_So that will not happen!_ **

-

“Inge/ge/genius to distribute the ex/ex/extra energy between the three of you.”

“Yes! And a good thing too -” Agatha finishes buttoning up her shirt, grin stretched wide enough to make her cheeks ache. “I believe another fifty-six point eight seconds, and I would have _exploded_ or something.”

“Or something,” the castle echoes. With a _click_ the muse’s mechanical eyes shift to look over her shoulder. It frowns. “Under the circir/circumstances-” it begins, “I/I am am am forced to admit that yo/you are most most likely oneoneone of the family… But if if if you are the _last_ o/of the family… then wh/wh/who is _that_?”

Agatha turns.

-

Things that Bill Heterodyne can now say, using actual words:

  1. Lucrezia infected Klaus with a slaver wasp, and seemed to be able to control him.
  2. Zola ‘Heterodyne’ looks _remarkably_ like his sister-in-law.
  3. He knows where Lucrezia’s base is. Or at least, where it was sixteen years ago.



-

(4. He is so incredibly proud of his daughter.)


End file.
